Deliciously Ella: 'There's a pressure to be sparkly and shiny all the time'

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Last year had its ups and downs for Ella Woodward. Her debut cookbook was the fastest selling ever, she fell in love, opened a café – and dealt with her parents’ very public splitCredit:
Andrew Crowley

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In utilitarian rolled-up denim dungarees, white shirt and trainers, Ella Woodward is not dressed to make an entrance, but as she advances down the wooden staircase, she is a mid-morning apparition. Floaty and poised with a waterfall of glossy hair, think a size-eight Venus rising from the waves, with a bottle of green juice in her hand.

The most obvious thing about Deliciously Ella, clear-skinned, grey-eyed, fresh as almond milk, is what a persuasive advertisement she is for healthy eating – and the growth of her food empire reflects that. The fruit and vegetable-based recipes she adopted to combat poor health, then began to share with others, have made her the biggest thing in nutrition since Jamie Oliver’s campaign for better food in schools.

Ella at The Mae Deli in new dungarees and trainers – a present from boyfriend Matt Credit:
Andrew Crowley

To sceptics, she might seem just another pretty exemplar of a self-denying ordnance of nuts, seeds and leaves. Chia today, gone tomorrow. Her diet sounds austere – no meat, no fish, no dairy products or eggs; no gluten, no refined sugars, no processed foods. She is lyrical about buckwheat and beetroot risotto; crazy about kale. Her sweet fix consists of date purée or brownies made with raw cacao and sweet potatoes. She rarely touches alcohol. What sets her apart from other “wellness entrepreneurs” is necessity: she devised this regime out of desperation and, having discovered how to eat herself back to health, she began to blog her findings.

“It all started as a very personal journey,” she says. “It happened so quickly and I had no idea what I was doing at first. It has been an amazing 18 months but there is a lot of pressure to be shiny and sparkly all the time. I love social media but it made me quite anxious. I wanted to direct some energy into other things I believed in, so that it wasn’t just about food but,” – she gestures around the wood-floored café – ''about this space.”

'It broke my self-esteem…it became a narrow, reclusive kind of life’

This space has been a focus during a tumultuous year that has had its low points as well as highs. Ella is the eldest daughter of Shaun Woodward – the former Tory MP who famously defected to Labour in 1999 and later became Northern Ireland Secretary – and his wife, Camilla, of the Sainsbury dynasty. She and her siblings – an older brother, Tom, and younger sisters, Olivia and Kate – enjoyed a privileged upbringing in Oxfordshire. However, her parents recently announced they were splitting up after 28 years of marriage, and Woodward is reported to have formed a relationship with another man. The family remains “incredibly close”, Ella says. “Of course, a break-up is not the easiest thing to go through, but I think in the long run my parents are going to be much happier – and that makes the four of us much happier.”

Ella's parents' wedding day in 1997Credit:
David Hartley/Rex

As Ella’s fortunes have risen professionally, so has her personal life blossomed. She has said she is “absolutely living a dream” with her fiancé, Matthew Mills, son of the Labour peer and former cabinet minister Tessa Jowell and the lawyer David Mills. They met last year, fell in love instantly (he had the good sense to order an almond milk latte) and will marry in April. “I wouldn’t ever have believed I would marry so young, but it was love at first sight so there was no point in holding back for the sake of it. It will be a small wedding. Weddings are such intimate and special days and I want to preserve that for us.”

Matt and Ella, who have gone into business together, had thought about calling the café Kale & Co but that sounded too uncompromisingly leafy, so they settled for The Mae Deli, taking the first letters of their names, with a nod to Austin, the cocker spaniel who shares their home in west London. They have sunk all their money into the project; she is in charge of “the fun stuff” – branding, customers, design – while Matt, who has a background in finance, is the business brain. The clientele is mostly young and everyone seems to know everyone else. There’s some girlie talk about Ella’s new dungarees and trainers – a present from Matt – before we get down to the serious business of sipping Deep Green Juice made with spinach, cucumber and celery (her), and coffee with brown rice milk (me).

“You’ve got to introduce people to things in a way they’re going to enjoy,” she says. “ I don’t want people to see healthy eating as a diet. I want it to be satisfying food that everyone takes pleasure in eating. “At home, Matt eats everything I do and is happy being a vegetarian. He’s obsessed with porridge and blueberries for breakfast. But if we go out to dinner he might have a burger and chips. You don’t have to eat healthily 24/7. At dinner on Saturday night with friends, enjoy what you want, have a glass of wine, as long as you don’t beat yourself up about it. Health is not about deprivation.”

It disappoints her that esoteric superfoods such as spirulina [powdered algae], baobab, maca powder and chia seeds – all of which she uses – have made healthy eating sound daunting. A journalist and his wife who lived on Ella’s recipes for a week last year reported that “posh” ingredients were hard to find and certain dishes left them hungry. They developed serious cravings for steak and sausages by the end. “Morale is hard to sustain,” they concluded, on a main course of broccoli with a tahini dressing. In her new book she takes on such critics.

'It was love at first sight so there was no holding back'

“You should be able to get everything from your local Tesco Metro,” Ella insists. “This book is focused on traditional ingredients like porridge, carrots and spinach. It’s all things you’ve heard of. There are lots of weekday suppers, big-batch things. You can chop it up, throw everything in a pan, leave it for an hour and you have a huge meal to feed all the family. “Normal people who want to improve their digestion don’t have to change everything overnight. Start by adding something. A different portion of food every meal for a week – that doesn’t sound scary – means 21 different things. A pear, an apple, maybe beetroot.”

Ella's parents Camilla Sainsbury and Shaun Woodward

What works for her, she admits, wouldn’t be right for everyone. “I’m not suggesting everyone should emulate me. Most people find a more relaxed approach to food works better – and that includes meat and fish. I eat this way all the time, not just because I love it but because I have to. It gives me a life. This horrible disease [postural tachycardia syndrome, or PoTS] is always lurking. If I don’t take care of myself something comes back.”

The Ella backstory is bleak. She had just finished her second year studying history of art at St Andrews University when she woke up one morning with a hugely distended stomach. “I looked like I was nine months pregnant.” When her father found her too exhausted to move and wearing his clothes because nothing else would fit, he took her straight to hospital. Doctors could not determine what was wrong – until a nurse observed that her heart rate had soared to an abnormal 190 [resting heart rate is 60-100] when she was standing – a characteristic of PoTS. Other symptoms include extreme exhaustion, dizziness, bloating and weakness. It is rare and poorly understood and there is no known cure. Medication failed to help.

Food at the Mae Deli is bright and cheery, full of vegetables and plant protein

“It completely broke any confidence or self-esteem I had. It became a narrow, reclusive kind of life.” Only her close family and her German boyfriend at the time, Felix von Abercron, knew the extent of her debilitation. “He was an absolute saint,” she says. “He was kind but never indulged me. He helped me to help myself.”

She began researching alternative therapies and found a book by American cancer survivor Kris Carr, who had adopted a diet of plant-based foods. “It was the first time something had seemed logical to me in this whole weird body meltdown,” she says.

When the Haribo-eating sugar monster announced to her family she was giving up meat and everything refined and processed, they laughed out loud. As a child, Ella refused to eat fruit and vegetables and she was no cook. Now she was devising plant-based menus. Little by little she began to feel better and to experiment with more adventurous recipes. She started her blog, Deliciouslyella.com, adding three new recipes a week. In the first six months she had 100,000 hits, by nine months it was 900,000.

Ella with her father, Shaun WoodwardCredit:
Getty Images

How exactly Ella cured herself is not entirely clear, but to doctors she has become a case study to help others with PoTS. “They said, 'We know it works and now we just need to understand why.’ For me, that was huge. I remember calling my mum and crying, then saying, 'I’m not this crackpot hippie and it’s not just a fluke. It works.’ ”

She came off all medication and completed her degree but perhaps her happiest achievement was to have won over her traditionalist family and friends. “Both my sisters are pretty much vegetarian now and so is my mum. Now when we sit down together, it’s often 60 per cent my food.”

Ella always assumed that after university she would go into the art world. “I was always the creative one. I think my family are pretty surprised that I’m now running my own business. The fact that it’s a food business is even more surprising.”

As if being Deliciously Ella were not enough, she is taking a three-year course in naturopathic nutrition and writing a third book. There is also the matter of organising that small wedding. “I’m trying to do a day at a time,” she says. “That way it does feel possible. I’ve learnt that there is no such thing as 'ready’.”